Tag Archives: Valerie Hobson

I didn’t have time to update my blog yesterday and, realistically, my blogging might be a bit hit and miss now as Christmas arrives, but I will try to write new postings as frequently as possible, even if my Dickens in December season ends up stretching into January. Just a few thoughts today on one of the greatest of all Dickens films.

In every adaptation of Great Expectations that I’ve seen (and there have been many, including two in the past year alone, both of which were disappointing, to me anyway), the beginning is one of the best scenes. The sight of the convict looming from behind the tombstone always makes a powerful impression – and its sense of danger is always there in the background behind everything that follows. However, the most unforgettable version of this opening on screen has to be the first scene of David Lean’s famous film, with young Pip (Anthony Wager) running across the windswept Kent marshes, and enduring his nightmare encounter with Magwitch (Finlay Currie).

I’ve been planning to review a few Dickens films to mark his bicentenary, and am now beginning at the end of his career – though I do plan to write about adaptations of some of the earlier novels too! I will be discussing the whole plot of Drood in this review, including the ending of the 1935 film and also of the most recent BBC adaptation. As a lifelong Dickens fan, I like all his novels and have read them all many times over the years. But his last, dark masterpiece, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, holds a special fascination for me, as for many other readers – from its stunning dream opening in the opium den through to its abrupt breaking off when the author died. The book’s real power lies not in the endless controversy over how it would have ended, but in the tortured double character of John Jasper, lay precentor of the cathedral by day and drug addict by night. (I’ve read an article somewhere pointing out the similarity between Jasper and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which had already been adapted for the screen twice when Hollywood turned its attention to Dickens’ novel.)